3/5.01: A Real Dome

Having lain out or documentation process and agenda the night before, the group was much more systematic and productive with our documentation.

Today, we were taking a trip to the Full Dome, a new video technology than provides a fully immersive space – a portable full dome – for viewers to watch an animation or film. Here, we got to experience this by watching a few of the films the company produced. It was certainly fun, almost like a trip down the theme park, where the objects appear directly in front of you. We watched the Chiang Mai 2015 project, an experiment with different visual effects with scenes from Chiang Mai. It almost felt like we were there, directly face to face with the streets and culture of Chiang Mai. Because of its immersive quality and engaging animations, I think it is a great platform to explain and present another culture.

Art, and such new technologies, can greatly aid the presentation and preservation of heritage. The professors certainly lauded this new technology for that. We should not see new technology as a threat to heritage and the past, but perhaps they could work together to benefit preservation efforts. It can be a tool for cultural heritage in the future, with a more accurate and close experience of cultural events, as opposed to objects in the museum. That would certainly be a whole new experience altogether, as opposed to walking around a museum, which was where we were headed to next – The Chiang Mai Heritage Museum.

Before that, we headed to the Museum Cafe for our lunch, where with different races and cultures (Irish, Singaporean, Thai), we played a game on local slangs, as well as some of the Irish terms from Professor Walsh. It was interesting to observe how speech may say something about a culture.

I also met Built and Prim, Thai students who followed us throughout our day trip. I love talking to people of different cultural backgrounds. To me, it is always fun to learn about each other’s differences in background. What it is like to be another person from another culture. They always seem much less predictable, and I love to see their differences in values, lifestyles, and behaviour. The thai people were also much more gentle and helpful than us Chinese.

The guide was a ladyboy, a norm in Thailand. Later in the bus, Built, Prim and the translator explained to us a bit more about ladyboys in Thailand. They said they were very open to such people. A guy could come to school dressed as a girl, and vice versa for a girl. People would then have to address them by their respective gender they are dressed as. Also, the translator said that many admire the ladyboys, because they can do manual labour like a man, and still dance as gracefully as a woman. In popular culture today, such as in Orange is The New Black (OITNB), I see that even western society is still not as forward as the thais. Many of us wondered if this was because traditional Lanna culture favoured girls over guys, and if a family only consisted of sons, the last son would have to turn gay or not take over the household.

Then, we took a visit to the Wat Gate Khar Rnam Museum. It was a strange place, filled with memorabilia of past colonial rulers in Chiang Mai. I did not know what to make of it, except that it was interesting to observe this dusty collection of various artefacts. Pieced together, I could make out a history of Chiang Mai that has now come to pass.

Our subgroups also divided to take our respective interviews. For me, our team conducted a video interview with the 3 thai students that were following us along – Built, Prim and Son, whilst the other team interviewed the owner of the place. I learnt that becoming a monk was a very common thing even with the young men here. Built was a monk for 8 months, and Son was studying to become a monk in the upcoming months. It certainly dispelled several of my assumptions of the idea that once you become a monk, you always stay a monk.

It then resonated with me that despite looking at the curated objects at the museums, the heritage really lies with the people. The stories that they tell and the experiences that they have, and I saw that what we were doing would indeed aid our understanding of Chiang Mai’s heritage.

Later in the evening, I had my first ever Thai massage. Thai massages are almost on the top of every traveller’s list when visiting Thailand. Even whilst I was in Prague, I saw signs for thai massages for tourists and locals alike. Back then; this tiny part of Thailand in the midst of Prague’s cold grey winter and festivities from the Christmas market, intermingled with a thai massage in the center of it, was certainly a strange and amusing sight to see. There was a touch of gaudiness of an overglorified appropriation of what a thai culture is was like according to their eyes (bright green, gold, traditional costumes, giant golden elephant sculptures). It provoked me to think, then, of the impact of tourism on one’s cultural heritage, and the perception of it. Perhaps they found that their massages were marketable, and its popularity within their culture developed from there. I feel that something very similar can happen within your own country, when you try to market your culture to a tourists, and I wanted to observe if I could see that potentially happening in Chiang Mai too.But for now, despite my initial fears, I found the massage to be very effective in reducing my muscle stiffness, and I would definitely do it again.

All in all, we felt that it was a very productive day, and the massage was a deserving treat. Filled with good emotion, I felt very appreciative of this trip and what I have been learning thus far. All my previous doubts were certainly cleared today, and I look forward to the upcoming days.